This evening's lesson is pretty simple. You know me, I like simple things. I'll explain more in the next paragraph, but for now, let's do some thinking. You're doing a futuristic comic and you want to make clear that no time passes between two events. You could either tell them in a little info box or you can display it in the word that you're doing. I suppose that telling the audience with an info box is the simplest answer, but I endeavor for better this time, I guess. I am going to put a clock into the scene and have it display 8:38 PM and 8:39 PM. How do I do it without making it stupid, though? Well, I'll just show Jav and the clock as he is doing something (event 1, I'll call it), then I'll show the clock in it's own window as he does event 2. It'll look a bit silly, but maybe it will confuse people into thinking that it's my artistic talent. Not like it hasn't been done before, but with little success. What did I put into this clock? Hmm, lemme see. I put a bit of thought into it and a bit of work, too. You might notice that the font is almost unreadable. It's because I invented it during Mathematical Methods of Physics (Physics 227) today. It involves two columns and three rows of boxes. The vertices are at the vertices of the boxes. between the vertices are straight lines. That allows for lines with slope 0, 1, 1/3 1/2, 2, 3 and infinity*. So I made the numerals 0-9 and put them into sequence for the clock. A waste of time? Possibly, yet I feel like it'll be nice to have my own font that I can use when I want. I know that I'll use it if only for the reason that I have it.
Before I teach you a bit about anime and JF, run, do not walk to http://www.indymedia.org/ and learn up about stuff happening that you should be interested in. Also, each regional site under IndyMedia has exclusive content, so go to http://seattle.indymedia.org/ or the indymedia where you live. So now we can go on to the obligatory lesson. Today's lesson is half-arsed-ness and lips. First off, lips in profile view are important and more ...importantly... hard. Ya, have you drawn perfect lips at profile before? I can say that this is my first time. Look close, even zoom into your subpixel microscope and you'll see: nothing. *sigh* I put so much work into those masterful lips and they aren't even one pixel wide. Well, if your lips look right, they shouldn't be more than a pixel wide. So I guess the short part of the lesson is that if you can't do something, you have two choices: steal or go with half of your heart. It may sound like a bad decision, but half-hearted-ness is often the best way to go into anything. If you do anything too much, it's likely to kill you. Water is an excellent example. Too much water will kill a person. I'm sure that you or I do not know from experience, but the scientists say so and I'm convinced. So, if you don't know how to draw lips at profile view, just don't do it at all and it'll take care of itself. If you really want to do them right, check out a good manga or a live model (but don't just leave it at that, interpret what an anime person would look like). There's a crack in the lips, guys have the bottom lip out usually, girls have a curvy upper lip, and rarely they are talking at profile, but if they are, their jaw and their upper lip move. A person who only uses their jaw to speak looks stupid, but you can find them in real life from time to time. Try it yourself in the mirror and you'll see.
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Making Of JF
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This was the first time I was ever far behind in JF. Scene 2. I decided to have a fan art instead of a page. But then I wondered if the fan art would be good enough. I thought: "These characters are really just half done and I haven't gotten the right animations for a decent looking fan art strip. Maybe I should just make it into an apology strip. I'll keep the reader's attention for two more days and I'll give them the real deal then." So I put it up and hoped it'd be okay. Well, nothing happened, so it didn't go over too badly. Anyway, you want to know what was going on when I was making these models. Well, it's pretty cool. I took two pictures of Tycho and Gabe over at Penny Arcade and make the models from scratch. They aren't bad, but they aren't perfected yet. I traced the eyes, mouth, eyebrows in Corel Draw and made a skin from that. It worked out far better than just using their actual pictures. I'm not sure why. Lesson One to be learned: when copying other's 2d work into 3d, redo the 2d work in 2d first.
